INCEST: THE LAST TABOO

by Philip Nobile(as originally published in Penthouse, December 1977
issue)

'Previously suppressed
material from
the original Kinsey interviews tells us that incest is
prevalent and often positive.'

Few things are
as powerful as a deviation whose time has come. Homosexuality, wife swapping,
open marriage, bisexuality, S & M, and kiddie porn have already had
their seasons. Just as we seemed to be running low on marketable taboos,
the unspeakable predictably popped up. Incest is supposed to be the ultimate
inhibition, universally recognized and unconsciously observed. Margaret
Mead declares that widespread breaches of this primative taboo may be more
disruptive of society than crime, suicide, and murder. So incest is very
serious business. Even the discontentedly civilized shudder at its mention.
Yet the game that every family can play, while repulsive and resistable,
appears undeniably bewitching and oddly exciting in passing fantasy.

Thematically, incest is rugged country.
Although Sophocles, Shakespeare, Stendahl, Shelly, Balzac, Wagner, Mann,
and Wharton have tried to express its horrible fascination, the popular
literature is understandably thin. But no longer. This once unbankable
subject is now the darling of the media. After centuries of restraint,
incest is finally a hit.

To wit: NBC News devoted its monthly Saturday
night Weekend show last May to a ninety-minute documentary on the
incest victims at a unique California child sex-abuse clinic.

In Pete Hamill's boxing novel Flesh
and Blood (Random House), young Brooklyn heavyweight Bobby Fallon sleeps
with his mother Kate and fights for the title. According to the catologue
copy, theirs is "a love affair that readers will never forget."

Carolyn Slaughter's Relations (Mason/Charter),
an August Literary Guild alternate, tells of the intimacies shared by a
brother and sister in the late nineteenth century. "The beauty of
their love is inevitably destroyed, but not the memory of the beauty. ..."

Twins (Putnam's) by Bari Wood and
Jack Geasland, is a recently published novel based on the weird deaths
of indentical-twin gynecologists in New York City in 1975. Their fictionalized
fatal flaw was incest. Paperback rights have been sold to NAL for $902,000,
and the movie version is about to be optioned.

Rewedded Bliss: Love, Alimony, Incest,
Ex-Spouses, and Other Domestic Blessings (Basic), by David Mayleas,
cites cases of sex between stepparents and stepchildren and gives rules
for avoiding this increasing "polyincest" in second marriages.

For her untitled book on incest (contracted
by Hawthorn), children's book author Louise Armstrong is tracking down
women for first-person accounts of the ordeal.

Redbook, Family Circle, People,
the Washington Star, and the New York Times have recently
broken the taboo in print with major features.

Three films with incest plots were exhibited
at Cannes last spring: Yves Boisset's The Yellow Taxi, with Fred
Astaire and Charlotte Rampling; Carlos Saura's Elisa, Vida Mia,
with Geraldine Chaplin and Fernando Rey; and benoit Jackquot's Les Enfants
du Placard, with Brigette Fossey and Jean sorel. This cluster arrives
six years after Louis Malle's sympathetic treatment of an incestous mother
and son in Murmur of the Heart.

Incest would be just
another media trend, faddishly seduced and abandoned after repealed use,
were it not for two forthcoming studies that promise to turn the prohibition
on its head. Both introduce and uphold the notion of "positive incest",
an especially dissonant oxymoron that will madden therapists and confuse
the masses more than the Kinsey reports did twenty-five years ago. Actually,
Kinsey was the first sex researcher to uncover evidence that violation
of the taboo does not necessarily shake heaven and earth. Unpublished data
taken from his original sex histories (some 18,000 in number) imply that
lying with a near relative rarely ends in tragedy. "In our basic sample,
the is, our random sample, only a tiny percentage of our incest cases had
been reported to police or psychologists," states Kinsey collaborator
Dr. Paul Gebhard, currently directory of the Institute for Sex Research
in Bloomington, Ind. "In fact, in the ones that were not reported,
I'm having a hard time recalling any traumatic effects at all. I certainly
can't recall any form among the brother-sister participants, and I can't
put my finger on any among the parent-child participants."

The nation was hardly
prepared for such talk in the fifties, but Gebhard is relasing Kinsey's
startling incest material for incorporation in Warran Farrell's work-in-progress,
The Last Taboo: The Three Faces of Incest. According to the cultural
gatekeepers in New York publishing, America still wasn't ready to hear
about positive incest in the mid seventies. Farrell's impressive credentials
-- a Ph.D. in political science from N.Y.U., former board member of the
National Organization for Women, and author of a book entitled Beyond
Masculinity -- counted as nothing. His forty-one-page outline (including
two sizzling case histories -- one with a New York writer who has intercourse
regularly with his seventeen-year-old daughter, occasionally supplemented
with threesomes with the daughter's girlfriend, and another with a Notre
Dame graduate who made love to his mother for ten years) was returned by
twenty-two houses last fall. MacGraw-Hill's editor-in-chief Fred Hills
wanted to acquire the project, but company executives said no. The top
editors at a major reprint concern were anxious to buy it until their lady
boss invoked an "over my dead body" line. Bantam was the only
firm that dared to bid, and Farrall signed for $60,000.

'Dr.
James Ramey, a sociologist, states, "If two relatives
make love in a caring situation, that's one thing. If it's rape, it's another.
You can't put the incest tag on that." '

Dr. James Ramey,
a sociologist with a multi-disciplinary Ph.D. from Columbia, has censored
his own positive incest manuscript for the past four years. Fearing for
his reputation and massive misunderstanding, Ramey hesitated to lead with
an apparently permission-giving book on man's oldest taboo. He refuses
to discuss specifics but volunteers that only one incest family from his
1,500-plus interviews and questionnaires ever ran afoul of the law. "And
that was a setup," he adds. Feeling that others are bound to soften
up the opposition before him, Ramey has opened negotiations for the book.
But unless he can control the publication date, promotion, and jacket and
advertising copy, he will not proceed. "You have to be careful when
you do a taboo-bucking book," he comments. "There are a lot of
slips between the cup and the lip."

NBC's Weekend
visit to the Santa Clara County Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center in
San Jose will not help Farrell and Ramey convince anybody that incest is
less than a scourge. Host Lloyd Dobyns was so depressed by the content
that he told the audience in his introduction that he wasn't sure he'd
watch himself it it weren't his own program. What followed was a montage
of contrite fathers and exploited daughters pouring out their unrelievedly
sad stories of incestuous grief. To interrupt the monotony of the documentary,
producer Clare Crawford-Mason frequently cut to Hank Giaretto, director
of the treatment center, for background and wisdom on the taboo. Giaretto
was positively against incest and linked it to prostitution, drug abuse
and sexual dysfunction in daughter victims. In his experience the normally
repressed impulse overpowered law-abiding, middle-class fathers when they
were down and out professionally and alienated from their wives. These
men looked toward their blossoming daughters first for consolation and
then for sex. A self-described humanist psychologist, Giaretto requires
every father patient to apologize to his daughter and confess his secret
to every family member still in the dark about his sins. Regardless of
the cost and embarrassment, he believes that public prostration is preferable
to discreet, private handling of incestuous entanglements.

For example, in a
curious composite portrait of an incestuous family drawn from Giaretto's
records and published in Family Circle, the father goes to prison
for six months, depletes his life savings, and loses his old job; his daughter
has to repeat a year in school; and the other two children freak out and
are forced into therapy. Branded as a child molester, the father has dim
prospects of future employment. Although such a cure may be worse than
the disease, Giaretto admits he would hand over to the law any participants
in incest who sought his counsel anynymously. "I have never come across
a happy incestuous family, " he said on Weekend. Of this there
is little doubt.

Although Farrell
had personally familiarized Giaretto with his findings on positive incest
before the Weekend taping, Giaretto failed to temper his apocalyptism
on camera. For instance, Giaretto might have hinted that his strictly patient
population was biased by definition and therefore could not possibly provide
a true picture of the practice. And he could have explained that brother-sister
incest, by far the most common kind, is known to be relatively harmless.
Producer Crawford-Mason, who is also a Washington correspondent for People,
loaded the documentary with so many recitals of the Auschwitz of incest
that key, clarifying questions were never asked. Both Crawford-Mason and
Dobyns deny sensationalizing a sensitive sexual issue before a wide-eyed-
audience of millions, emphasizing that the show was about Giaretto's center,
not incest. "If the subject was incest," Dobyns conceded, "we
did it poorly."

Crawford-Mason won't
grant the bias inherent in Giaretto's sample. "You're trying to attack
my story," she says testily. "How many documentaries have you
produced? ... If we didn't make it clear that brother-sister incest was
not as traumatizing it was a mistake. We discussed incest for the first
time in public. And the very fact that you're writing this article proves
that the show succeeded. You have a right to comment, but it's Monday-morning
quarterbacking."

Warren Farrell admires
Giaretto's rehabilitative mission among legitimate victims, for his own
investigation allows for considerable negativity, particularly in the father-daughter
category. But he faults Weekend for its skewed perspective. "It
was like interviewing Cuban refugees about Cuba. Weekend recorded
sexually abused children speaking about their sexual abuse, which is valuable,
but the inference is that all incest is abuse. And that's not true."

Farrell was reluctant
to give a tour of the heart of the country. His research is incomplete,
and the data collected from 200 in-depth interviews (he plans to have 250
for the book) await a computer run. Although he vowed not to speak out
prior to publication (probably in 1979), he consented to a one-time debriefing
at a Chinese restaurant near his Riverside Drive apartment overlooking
the Hudson River in Manhattan. At thirty-four, he is separated from his
wife, who is an IBM executive, and childless.

The idea for the
book struck him after reading a Times article about incest early
last year. According to the piece, only a tiny fraction of the cases ever
reaches the courts. In 1976 New York City police received merely one incest
complaint and no arrests. Farrell wondered if perhaps some incidents weren't
reported because the relationships went smoothly. Since nothing had been
written about nonpatient-nonoffender participants, he decided the gap was
too large to ignore.

What is the incidence?
Farrell's survey of 2,000 undergraduates in state as well as community
colleges yielded a 4 to 5 percent figure. Kinsey's incidence was 3.9, but
his collaborator, Dr. Wardell Pomeroy, thinks that the real figure is closer
to 10 percent. Incest is not simply a deviation; it is a crime. People
tend not to respond as honestly as they would about other modes of unconventional
sex. Positive incest is even more hidden, since nothing is gained by disclusure.
Thus most of Farrell's positive participants who replied to his ads in
the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, Psychology
Today, and the New Republic were speaking out for the first
time.

Farrell cautions
that his statistics are rough and confined just to his current sample of
200 -- including people from the unemployed, the working class, business
executives, Ph.D.'s and professional athletes. But his preliminary data
suggest that the taboo needs severe overhauling. Breaking down the effects
into positive (beneficial), negative (traumatic), and mixed (nontraumatic
but not regarded as beneficial) categories -- the three faces of incest
in his subtitle -- he says that the ovewhelming majority of cases fall
into the positive column. Cousin-cousin (including uncle-niece and aunt-nephew)
and brother-sister (including sibling homosexuality) relations, accounting
for about half of the total incidence, are perceived as beneficial in 95
percent of the cases.

Mother-son incest
represents 10 percent of the incidence and is 70 percent positive, 20 percent
mixed, and 10 percent negative for the son. For the mother it is mostly
positive. Farrell points out the boys don't seem to suffer, not even from
the negaive experience. "Girls are much more influenced by the dictates
of society and are more willing to take on sexual guilt."

The father-daughter
scene, ineluctably complicated by feelings of dominance and control, is
not nearly so sanguine. Despite some advertisments, calling explicitly
for positive female experiences, Farrell discovered that 85 percent of
the daughters admitted to having negative attitudes toward their incest.
Only 15 percent felt positive about the experience. On the other hand,
statistics from the vantage of the fathers involved were almost the reverse
-- 60 percent positive, 20 percent negative. "Either men see these
relationships differently," comments Farrell, "or I am getting
selective reporting from women."

'Do
you talk about rape and courtship in the same breath?
Both are defined by intercourse, but the consent and spirit are different.
So, too, with so-called coercive and noncoercive incest.'

In a typical traumatic
case, an authoritarian father, unhappily married in a sexually repressed
houshold and probably unemployed, drunkenly imposes himself on his young
daughter. Genital petting may have started as early as age eight with first
intercourse occurring around twelve. Since the father otherwise extends
very little attention to his daughter, his sexual advances may be one of
the few pleasant experiences she has with him. If she is unaware of society's
taboo and if the mother does not intervene, she has no reason to suspect
the enormity of the aberration. But when she grows up and learns of the
taboo, she feels cheapened. If she comes from the lower class, she may
turn to prostitution or drugs as compensation for self-worthlessness, although
a direct cause-effect link is far from certain. The trauma is spread through
all classes, Farrell observes, but incest is more likely to be negative
in the lower class.

Ramey would quarrel
with Farrell's classification of the above case as incest. When coercion
is involved, it's plain rape in his opinion. "You can't put the incest
tag on that," he argues. "If two relatives make love in a caring
situation, that's one thing. If it's rape, it's another." Dr. C.A.
Tripp, a New York sex researecher who is unafraid of positive incest, also
contests Farrell's methodology. "Do you talk about rape and courtship
in the same breath?" he says. "Both are defined by intercourse,
but the consent and spririt are vastly different. So, too, with so-called
coercive and noncoercive incest. The two shouldn't be lumped together as
two aspects of the same phenomenon."

It is not difficult
to guess the benefits that accrue to the incestuous father, but what's
in it for the 15 percent of daughters who inform Farrell that they liked
it? The answer is a tender, nonfumbling, and loving introduction to sex
that is wildly arounsing for all its wickedness and devoid of the usual
teenage backseat trial and error. One daughter told Farrell that she preferred
her father to "the locker room jerkoffs" who were interested
only in scoring with her. She felt that they, rather that her father, were
trying to take advantage. If the father lets his daughter go gently, avoiding
jealous fits, their relationship may be fondly remembered. Some have been
known to continue after marriage.

"When I get
my most glowing positive cases, 6 out of 200," says Farrell, "the
incest is part of the family's open, sensual style of life, wherein sex
is an outgrowth of warmth and affection. It is more likely that the father
has good sex with his wife, and his wife is likely to know and approve
-- and in one or two cases to join in."

Incredible? Impossible?
Insane? Well, just such a father-daughter case happened in New York City.
A forty-two-year-old Jewish writer, contentedly married for twenty years,
phoned Farrell after reading his ad and related the following story.

Two years ago the
writer happened to be at his beach house alone with his attractive fifteen-year-old
daughter. He watched her strip out of her bikini -- nudity was not
unusual in the family -- and fantasized about having sex with her while
she showered. His wife's appendix operation had curtailed his sex for the
previous five months. This day the women on the beach and a few beers had
led him into special temptation. When the daughter emerged from the bathroom
in a towel, he greeted her in the nude and erect. Although he had never
consciously desired incest before, he told his daughter that he missed
sex. Without further prompting she fellated him to orgasm. Then she cried
until he assured her that they hadn't done anything wrong; he asked her
not to tell her mother.

Two weeks later the daughter walked around
the house naked until the father approached her. That day he deflowered
her to their mutual satisfaction. But the father was careful not to push
things. He did not want to hurt his daughter, who seemed to have an active
sex life with boys her own age. Several weeks later the daughter took the
initiative again, this time with a girl friend as a third party. This threesome
was the most exciting sex the father had ever had. Soon the father and
daughter were having intercourse three times a week, repairing to motels
with their secret passion. When they were six months into the incest, the
wife unexpectedly returned to the apartment from shopping and caught the
pair in the act. Despite some initial hysteria, the wife okayed everything.
Apparently she was relieved that her husband's strong sexual demands could
be met at home rather than with hookers, and she hinted that she'd like
to watch the two of them in bed. When the writer talked with Farrell, the
incest had been ongoing for two years. The father is enjoying himself immensely,
and he says that his daughter prefers his expertise to the groping of her
boyfriends, who just want to be "deepthroated." The writer insists
that they're both much better friends now that before.

Incredible. Impossible. Insane. But unless
the writer is deluded, it is perhaps true and definitely positive. However,
Farrell has become increasingly skeptical of reports from fathers, for
they are seldom confirmed by daughters. For a woman's view of positive
incest, see Edith Wharton's long supressed short-story fragment Beatrice
Palmato, appended to R.W.B. Lewis's biography. It is the best read
with one's feet in holy water, as Wharton leaves nothing to the pornographic
imagination.

Brother-sister relations are attended by
fewer complications, since domination is not a factor. Farrell recounted
the history of a twenty-five-year-old woman who had happily slept with
her older brother for two years until he left home, four years ago, to
get married. Today they talk on the phone every week and remain very close.
The woman has no regrets and regards her incest as one of the best sexual
experiences of her life.

She began the long seduction of her brother
at the age of thirteen or fourteen, prancing around their suburban New
York home with her robe open. The tease progressed to leaving her bedroom
door open while she was undressed. Apparently, the brother ignored these
early invitations but later reciprocated with exhibitionism of his own.
When she was eighteen, the girl started masturbating in bed, naked and
with the door ajar. The brother responded by simltaneously masturbating
in his own room. Soon they were masturbating together and performing oral
sex. In a few weeks they engaged in sexual intercourse for the first time.

The sister was turned on to making love
with a mirror image of herself. Breaking the taboo only heightened her
pleasure. They had sex twice a week for the duration of their liason, often
dipping into fantasies and Polaroid pornography. The brother once watched
her make love to another man; another time he looked on as she exercised
in the nude with a girl friend. On both occasions he made love to her immediately
afterward. Their familial arguments ceased during the affair, and they
became the best of friends. The sister now feels the incest helped in overcoming
her inhibitions, though she and her brother had an active sex life with
other partners while they were involved. They have slept together only
once since her brother married.

Farrell realizes the risks that attend
publication of this book. "In a society where men are powerful and
exploitive and insensitive to women's feelings, which is reinforced by
female adaptiveness and a daughter's lack of power, data like these can
be used as an excuse for the continuation and magnification of that exploitation.
When I consider that, I almost don't want to write the book."

Since neither victim nor benefactor needs
Farrell's confirmation, why does he gamble with bringing on a sexual deluge?
"First, because millions of people who are now refraining from touching,
holding, and genitally caressing their children, when that is really part
of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of
children and themselves. Maybe this needs repressing, and maybe it doesn't.
My book should at least begin the exploration.

"Second, I'm finding that thousands
of people in therapy for incest are being told, in essence, that their
lives have been ruined by incest. In fact, their lives have not generally
been affected as much by the incest as by the overall atmosphere. My book
should help therapists put incest in perspective."

Farrell also hopes to change public attitudes
so that participants in incest will no longer be automatically perceived
as vitims. "The average incest participant can't evaluate his or her
experience for what it was. As soon as society gets into the picture, they
have to tell themselves it was bad. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."

If pushed to the wall, would Farrell urge
incest on families? "Incest is like a magnifying glass," he summarizes.
"In some circumnstances it magnifies the beauty of a relationship,
and in others it magnifies the trauma. I'm not recommending incest between
parent and child, and especially not between father and daughter. The great
majority of fathers can grasp the dynamics of positive incest 'intellectually'.
But in a society that encourages looking at women in almost purely sexual
terms, I don't believe they can translate this understanding into practice."

The joys of incest will be lost on the
therapeutic community. A pocket of Kinseyans, however, won't dispute the
possibility a priori, as most other psychotherapists, in particular
the Oedipally oriented, must. "Incest was grist for our mill,"
comments Dr. Pomeroy, now a marriage therapist in San Francisco. "We
were interested in what people did and couldn't have given a damn about
what was right or wrong or proper or improper." Yet it took Pomeroy
a quarter of a century to come out of the research closet. His article
in last November's Penthouse Forum -- Incest: A New Look
-- landed like an unopened parachute in professional sex circles, but it
was the first in this new antitaboo wave.

Although Pomeroy reports many beautiful
romances between father and daughter, he discriminates between the consenting
adult variety and pedophilia. "The trouble with incest isn't incest
at all," he remarks; "it's pedophilia. There are real problems
with a thirty-five-year-old father having sex with his thirteen- or foureen-year-old
daughter because of his one-up position. But a twenty-five-year-old woman
sleeping with her fifty-year-old father -- what the hell difference does
it make? It's not a society's concern." (Dr. Ramey came across a son
who crawled into his mother's bed for the first time when he was past fifty.)

'
"Maybe this [incest] needs repressing, and maybe it doesn't,"
says author Warren Farrell.
"My book should at least begin the exploration." '

Despite the drawbacks of pedophilic incest,
Pomeroy has seen it flourish under ideal conditions. "Here's a husband
who's fairly mature and thinks of incest only as a stepping-stone for his
daughter in developing her sex life. So her urges her to have social-sexual
contacts outside the home. I've seen cases like this but they are the great
exception. The odds are against it, because the father can seldom be objective.
I'm treating a man now who's had intercourse with his fourteen-year-old
daughter. When he ... tried to control her outside sex, she blew the whistle."

Pomeroy speculates that incest occurs most
frequently at the two extremes of society, since rich and poor tend to
be less affected by sexual taboos. He eschews elaborate interpretations
of the impulse that drives mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers
into bed with each other. "Sex is fun," he explains. "That's
the overriding factor. You can't overlook that sex is pleasurable enough
to overrule this terrific taboo in some cases."

This reporter retorted that he, too, endorsed
the fun of sex but wouldn't dream of incest with any of his three daughters.
"Perhaps you wouldn't because you've been fathering too much -- wiping
their noses, changing their diapers, and so forth," Pomery replied.
"The fathering principle kills the sex impulse. It certainly does
for me. I wouldn't consider sleeping with my daughter, although I've given
it much thought and even talked to her about it. And she said to me, 'You're
a great father, but you don't turn me on either.'"

According to Dr. Tripp, the lifting of
the taboo would not automatically invite an avalanche of incestuous activity.
Far from being a potential hotbed of sexual tension, the nuclear family
just about kills lasciviousness around the hearth -- and for good reason.
"It's not the fathering and the intimacy," states Tripp, "but
the closeness and the lack of mystique that block out sexual interest between
any two people, i.e., father and daughter, friend and friend, and comfortable
'old shoe' husband and wife. The most fascinating thing in sexual motivation
is the appeal of a slightly hidden or removed object. What seems to permit
incest to emerge at all is the insertion of some kind of alienation into
the scene, e.g., the father is distant, often away from home, or the home
itself is split, etc."

Willard Gaylin, a psychiatrist at Columbia
Medical School as well as president of the Institute for Biology, Ethics,
and the Life Sciences, is appalled by the positive incest hypothesis. For
him it is an intellectual and moral contradiction. He wouldn't believe
it if it lay down on his couch. "I'd have to say that what's wrong
with incest is the same as what's wrong with homosexuality. It's not necessarily
wrong for the persons to do it if it gives them pleasure. But it implies
that some wrong has already occurred -- the there was not a normal development
out of the incestual stage into finding men other than the father attractive.
Incest usually represents a very distorted structure and is never a positive
good. ... After all, a child will have plenty of intercourse in life, but
he or she is going to have only one crack at a caring parent."

Despite Kinsey's statistics, Gaylin remains
unconvinced of nontraumatic incest. "We deal in probabilities, not
possibilities, in medicine. If incest became a fun-loving way of initiating
your kids into sex, it would do more harm than good. I tend to trust the
wisdom of the Old and New Testaments and every other religious group."

Dr. Abraham Kardiner, one of psychiatry's
grand old men who did early studies on the taboo, worries about this article.
"You will throw a monkey wrench into society by introducing the idea
that incest is beautiful," he says. "The family is in enough
trouble already from homosexuality."

Television producer Claire Crawford-Mason
is equally dubious. "Saying that incest isn't harmful is a male chauvinist
cop-out. Father-daughter incest is the ultimate victimization. Mother-son
incest must be devastating to the son... The medical profession ignores
two- and three-year-olds with gonorrhea of the throat; the doctors insist
they catch it from bed sheets."

Warren Farrell prophesies that incest will
be a major social issue in the eighties. If so, the debate will be bloody
and presumably unproductive. Those who accept the original sin of incest,
the great Judeo-Christian majority, will not be dissuaded by anyone's case
studies. The last taboo could become the last straw as the Save Our Children
movement heads closer to home.

According to the
original publication,
the above article is copyright 1977 Penthouse International Ltd.,
as a portion of the December 1977 issue of Penthouse.
It is reproduced here under the Fair Use Doctrine
for the limited nonprofit purpose of establishing the existence
of the article in question, the veracity of citations referencing same,
and the context and accuracy of quotations taken
from the article in the course of educational and political discussion.

Except
as otherwise noted, all contents in this collection are copyright 1996-2023
the liz library. All rights
reserved.
This site is hosted and maintained by argate.net.
Send queries to: sarah-at-thelizlibrary.org.